Technical Field
The disclosed embodiments relate in general to techniques for automating hypervideo playback and, more specifically, to systems and methods for visualizing playback plans of hypermeetings.
Description of the Related Art
Meetings are an important part of collaborative activities but are difficult to schedule, particularly when a set of collaborators is spread across multiple locations and time zones. Additionally, meetings often overlap in terms of content. This can cause difficulties as meetings that build on what was discussed in prior meetings result in barriers for those not at prior meetings and meetings that re-discuss topics are often viewed as unproductive by the participants that were at prior meetings.
Meetings with asynchronous participation are desired but currently not well supported. Systems either treat the original meeting as a series of independent discussions, losing their interconnections, or they record everything putting the onus of locating and responding to discussion on participants. U.S. patent application Ser. No. 14/574,386 describes a solution for recording multiple asynchronous meetings by representing a series of meetings in a form of navigable video recordings called a hypervideo. The hypervideo consists of several video segments that are linked together using links.
As would be appreciated by persons of ordinary skill in the art, such hypervideos may be displayed in many different ways. While manual link following is possible, automatic link following and other assisted navigation to support the viewer in seeing relevant parts of the hypervideo in the appropriate order during hypervideo playback would be desirable. Additionally desirable would be a system that would provide visualizations of playback sequences of video segments in hypervideo.